Helden von Heute
09 Jun - 31 Jul 2010
HELDEN VON HEUTE
09.06.10 - 31.07.10
Robert Gfader, Joe Hardesty, Moussa Kone, Robert Muntean, Katrin Plavcak, Alfons Pressnitz, Bianca Regl, Georg Ritter, Lila Rock, Iv Toshain
Imagine a city: a city whose inhabitants live without the pressure to become more accomplished, more polished, more professional; a city without a sense of style, without constraints, without qualifications and without curfew. A slow city in a modern time, its most recent major moment happened almost a generationago. This city is Berlin.
Why Berlin? It is poor. It is dirty. And above all, it is cheap. Berlin is relaxed,but it is still transient, enough so that its fluctuation may be gestured towardsand leaned upon and coaxed a little, as necessary, if only for the sake of argument. This should be, and usually is, enough. Enough for the seven artists represented in this exhibition, and enough for the 6,991 other artists, who have chosen Berlin as their ersatz-home. To wit: Vienna is far too tight; Sofia is far too remote; and London, well, London is extortionate.
In any case, all of the artists we are introducing here made a decision to live in Berlin, and Berlin – that poor, dirty and cheap city – is where they first met, probably in a candlelit bar with the wallpaper peeling off the walls. It is where they still meet, and where they pay less for nine beers than for a pencil in Paris. But our heroes have more in common than that. They are young, and they are beautiful, and they grew up in surroundings that felt difficult to touch: chafed and pinched, rubbing up against the sharpened zenith of an oversaturated information age.
Our heroes are accustomed to mobility, flexibility, consumerism and individualism; they are educated, well-read, and analytical creatures, prone to involuntary and spontaneous expository critique. Each one has developed his or her own language and vocabulary, accent and discourse: blurred introspectiveness met with cold-hearted archiving and ordering; societies, precisely yet prosaically dissected with a knife; snapshots of rainbow-colored brain damage; consumerist sins dripping with paint and sticky with gelatin; preternatural tendencies manifested through diamonds hovering in dark woods, and through black holes neatly fenced in by construction workers; and faceless crowds dancing to the rhythm of an exoteric ritual.
For these artists, the diversity of their works issues a lively discourse. Their goal is simple: it is not ideal art, but rather the reckoning of the postmodern collage of anything goes. Our heroes are negotiating nothing less than the perception of reality. Thematic approaches always terminate in the drawn, painted, and cut image: content to be read anew, once standing alone. Each isolated work is not subordinate to a strong ideology. Individually, they float through space, colliding gently at unusual points, only to break apart again, each one continuing its own unascertained journey.
Bianca Regl, Robert Muntean
09.06.10 - 31.07.10
Robert Gfader, Joe Hardesty, Moussa Kone, Robert Muntean, Katrin Plavcak, Alfons Pressnitz, Bianca Regl, Georg Ritter, Lila Rock, Iv Toshain
Imagine a city: a city whose inhabitants live without the pressure to become more accomplished, more polished, more professional; a city without a sense of style, without constraints, without qualifications and without curfew. A slow city in a modern time, its most recent major moment happened almost a generationago. This city is Berlin.
Why Berlin? It is poor. It is dirty. And above all, it is cheap. Berlin is relaxed,but it is still transient, enough so that its fluctuation may be gestured towardsand leaned upon and coaxed a little, as necessary, if only for the sake of argument. This should be, and usually is, enough. Enough for the seven artists represented in this exhibition, and enough for the 6,991 other artists, who have chosen Berlin as their ersatz-home. To wit: Vienna is far too tight; Sofia is far too remote; and London, well, London is extortionate.
In any case, all of the artists we are introducing here made a decision to live in Berlin, and Berlin – that poor, dirty and cheap city – is where they first met, probably in a candlelit bar with the wallpaper peeling off the walls. It is where they still meet, and where they pay less for nine beers than for a pencil in Paris. But our heroes have more in common than that. They are young, and they are beautiful, and they grew up in surroundings that felt difficult to touch: chafed and pinched, rubbing up against the sharpened zenith of an oversaturated information age.
Our heroes are accustomed to mobility, flexibility, consumerism and individualism; they are educated, well-read, and analytical creatures, prone to involuntary and spontaneous expository critique. Each one has developed his or her own language and vocabulary, accent and discourse: blurred introspectiveness met with cold-hearted archiving and ordering; societies, precisely yet prosaically dissected with a knife; snapshots of rainbow-colored brain damage; consumerist sins dripping with paint and sticky with gelatin; preternatural tendencies manifested through diamonds hovering in dark woods, and through black holes neatly fenced in by construction workers; and faceless crowds dancing to the rhythm of an exoteric ritual.
For these artists, the diversity of their works issues a lively discourse. Their goal is simple: it is not ideal art, but rather the reckoning of the postmodern collage of anything goes. Our heroes are negotiating nothing less than the perception of reality. Thematic approaches always terminate in the drawn, painted, and cut image: content to be read anew, once standing alone. Each isolated work is not subordinate to a strong ideology. Individually, they float through space, colliding gently at unusual points, only to break apart again, each one continuing its own unascertained journey.
Bianca Regl, Robert Muntean